Cancelled: Rehearing the Past: Identity and Indenture in Indian Guyanese Music

Between 1838 and 1917, hundreds of thousands of Indians were brought to the Caribbean to work as indentured laborers on British plantation. For many Indo-Guyanese musicians today, the past is a reminder of indenture’s traumas or an embarrassing site of rural stereotypes. For others, indenture signifies heritage and pride in hard work. How does one construct shared identities of the indenture diaspora when the past is so fraught? This presentation is about the faintly heard echoes of indenture in Guyana and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora a century after the brutal practice was abolished in the British Empire.

**This presentation was canceled due to a family emergency for the presenter.**